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These Two Minority High School Girls Wrote An Actual Textbook On Racial Literacy

Two minority girls who are students at New Jersey’s Princeton High School of Mercer County have co-authored a textbook, which will be used to assist Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies.

According to Teen Vogue Magazine, Winona Guo (pictured left) and Priya Vulchi (pictured right) are the co-founders and co-presidents of Princeton Choose: The Classroom Index. Guo, 17, and Vulchi, 17, have a strong desire to improve racial literacy in American society where cultural ignorance and race-based insensitivity runs rampant.

Guo and Vulchi’s ideas about their activist cause began after they experienced some of the same racially-charged adversities and micro-aggressions that their fellow black students went through.

“When Priya [an Indian-American] and Winona, a Chinese American, first started their journey with Choose, they encountered similar dismissive comments from others of their peers as well,” wrote Keah Brown, a Teen Vogue contributor.

“That changed when their peers saw all the great work they have been doing to shift the conversation of race in America and put their words into action,” Brown continued.

Guo and Vulchi also conducted exclusive interviews with Teen Vogue. A correspondent with the youth culture magazine asked the pair about how they met and the process they went through to get started on their authorship.

“We actually met sophomore year and we had the same AP U.S. History teacher and in class. We had been talking about Eric Garner, Ferguson, and other major events. We had started talking in general about race in America and telling our own personal stories,” Guo said.

“After we collected these stories we were doing some presentations at different schools and to different faculty members talking about the general need to address race. It wasn’t until we spoke to our own high school faculty [at a] meeting the next day [when] a lot of the teachers came up to us and said ‘we understand the issue we just need more concrete substitutes to help our students and create a better learning environment,”‘ Vulchi said.

You can read a transcript of Guo and Vulchi’s entire interview with Teen Vogue here.